


Glass

by Agib



Series: Febuwhump 2020 [21]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Trauma, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s02e12 Profiler Profiled, Episode: s02e15 Revelations, First Kiss, Getting Together, Hurt Derek Morgan, Hurt Spencer Reid, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Metaphors, Past Drug Addiction, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Violence, Pre-Relationship, Psychological Trauma, Trauma, Unspoken Bonding Through Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22919797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agib/pseuds/Agib
Summary: Derek thinks a piece of glass spurs two trains of thought; the beauty in its fragility, and the ease in which you could shatter it.He thinks glass is what himself and Spencer are.
Relationships: Derek Morgan/Spencer Reid
Series: Febuwhump 2020 [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619311
Comments: 13
Kudos: 276





	1. Glass

**Author's Note:**

> They deserve such a soft life.
> 
> I don't know how I feel about bonding through trauma, so this isn't an implication that this is the deeper meaning or whatever. Let's just call it supporting through trauma.
> 
> Read the tags before you read the fic!

He knows glass can be cracked. 

A spiderweb of patterns that reach out from point of impact but hold together, nonetheless. You could throw a rock at a window and only leave behind a chip with several tangled lines of cracks, and it wouldn’t be you who broke the window, it would be the next person who ran their fingers idly over the surface that shattered the screen.

This was why, Derek thought, he didn’t cry until eight days after his father’s funeral.

He had gotten into a stupid fight with someone on the street, it was over nothing – he can’t remember even to this day – but when he felt his fist cracking against the other boy’s jaw, that was when he cried.

He won the fight, with tears streaming down his face and choked off gasping noises he had fought _hard._

So, in a way, he was similar to glass. He didn’t often break until hours after the initial damage.

Glass could slice and tear and draw blood.

After Buford, he tore holes in his relationships. He yelled at his Ma, fought with his sisters, got into fights with his friends, poured so much aggression into his football plays that he twisted bone and sprained muscle.

His words sliced up any care others had for him into ribbons, and yet throughout it all his family stayed. He hurt them, but they cared. His Ma believed it was how he coped after his father, his sisters assumed it was a part of boys growing up, but he knew. And he fractured tethers that held him close to others because of it.

When the team followed him to Chicago, dispensed everything they had into the case, he yelled. He insulted and lashed out like his words were knives and his glare was poison.

And after the confrontation he had with the man that made him slice and tear like glass, Hotch did everything he could to help. He understood, he swept files and signatures of the case under the rug to avoid picking at the scab, he said nothing, only alluded to the fact that he was there if needed.

Reid stayed quiet, kept statistics to himself, gently turned pages one seat over from him on the flight back to Quantico. He didn’t quote or explain the methodology behind his behaviour since Buford, he treated him the same.

And that was all Derek could really ask for. He was afraid of the comfort his loved ones would try to provide. Because sometimes the tenderness you are presented with, serves as the very proof that you had been broken.

He never believed in beauty after the pain. He was a survivor, yes, but he didn’t see himself as a story to worship. He wasn’t an idealistic painting of virtue in the wake of his torment, he was scarred and would be forever.

_Am I supposed to be grateful to have survived this?_

He appreciated the convenience of being able support the victims he worked with after cases, of course. Because God knows nobody else in the team could understand the outstretched cracks that scatter through your entire life following something like that.

So, Reid and Hotch keeping to themselves and not treating him any different meant the world because he didn’t have to hold together an armful of glass shards from his childhood and pretend they couldn’t slice him open.

Because they can, and they do.

\----

Hankel made him feel like he melted as glass did.

Under the intense heat, the heavy restriction of knowing Spencer was cold, hurt, alone, he was being pulled taught in different directions. He followed each and every lead, stuck to the computer screen with Penelope after the first livestream like a wax seal.

And when he watched Spencer’s heart stop, he caved in.

\----

The two of them were so unlike each other, physically or not, Spencer was nothing in the same as Derek.

He was an idealist, always alive until proven dead was his mindset for the victims. Spencer was a realist, he spoke the facts, the statistics. Derek paved his own way and Spencer was a conformist. He stood conflict in the face and wasn’t afraid to get dirty doing so, while Spencer was passive, talked unsubs down slowly, carefully.

He was self-assured and understood he was cared for despite the challenges he’d faced.

Spencer had the soft discomfort of someone who had never been treated well – hardly loved – and was forced to improvise.

And yet somehow, when the tall kid who tucked his hair incessantly behind his ear and had an IQ the size of his heart joined the team, Derek softened like tar in the sun.

The boy was uneasy with touch, with affection, and Derek was quietly glad for it. He wanted people to be afraid of touching him, of reaching out, he had to be the instigator. He had to be the one who decided he trusted and could trust another. Gradually, at least, Spencer fidgeted less under his hand, relaxed into his role in the field, grew close enough to laugh carelessly.

Derek thinks it was then that he comprehended how he felt about Spencer.

Hankel overdosing him only solidified it further.

\----

The reassuring weight of Spencer pressing against him in the graveyard had welded back the fractures he had received watching the same man die hours earlier. But the scars would remain, just as the image of the younger man seizing alone on the floor of the cabin would too.

The weeks which followed Hankel were hard on Derek, only because he didn’t want to interject himself into Spencer’s recovery when the other man had given him ample space after Chicago. He had nightmares of finding the kid overdosed on the floor of the bathroom, his track marks eating up the slender, unblemished skin of his arms.

If there had been a divide in their personal lives after Chicago, there wasn’t one after the month which followed Hankel.

Derek held him against his chest when the shaking coiled throughout his smaller frame, pressed dampened cloths against his head as he heaved over a toilet bowl. He stayed by his side and gently pulled down his sleeve when Spencer unconsciously scratched at the needle marks Hankel had left behind. He was there because that was what Spencer needed.

Two months earlier, after Chicago, Spencer had given him space because that was what Derek had needed. 

Spencer was good like that.

Maybe that was why he doesn’t pull away when Spencer kisses him outside of a bar after a case in California.

It takes him a long moment to close his eyes, he’s too busy processing the heat against his lips and the careful hand splayed across his sternum.

“Sorry,” Spencer says a little breathlessly when he steps back.

And Derek wants to say, _it’s okay._

Instead, he finds his hands on Spencer’s waist and neck, guiding him in now that neither of them are off-guard nor unprepared.

The weight of the leaner frame against his chest reminds him of their first embrace in the graveyard, except Spencer doesn’t shake. In its place is steadiness and surety as those careful hands reach back up to cup both of his wrists, a silent proclamation of _this is okay. I want this._

Derek thinks a piece of glass spurs two trains of thought; the beauty in its fragility, and the ease in which you could shatter it.

He thinks glass is what himself and Spencer are.


	2. Understand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quotes are, in order,
> 
> \- What does forgiveness taste like? (r.n)
> 
> \- Victoria Erickson, Edge of Wonder: Notes from the Wildness of Being.

Morgan is miles of unblemished skin, but he feels and acts as though his mind were frayed. He is quick to violence, and even quicker to anger. He fights, and yet he speaks about what he’s fighting with. At the best of times, he helps Reid to understand. Often, he’s wordless but the younger man still comprehends what is needed from him. On worse days, he breathes disgust and hisses sentences that lick across others’ confidence like flames.

_Do I still taste of war? Can you still feel the battles on my skin, stitched across my back? Am I still rebuilding bone by fragile bone?_

Reid is closed off in his silence. His careful limbs are scarred from abuse and jittery from the memories. His walls are ceaseless and unclimbable by almost everyone despite the way he smiles. Reid hates to speak, to even acknowledge his failing ability to cope. Morgan must push and dig answers from him, has to extract the truth in order to even begin helping. On bad days, Reid is quiet, gentle, but inside his head and at the crook of his elbow rages a war.

_Just because you are soft doesn’t mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the colour gold._

\----

Following the case in California, Spencer thinks he played the riskiest game.

Against him, he can feel the steadily growing pounding beneath his palm. Derek looks at him as if he’d swallowed a rock.

_“Sorry,”_ he’d said in earnest, pulling backward from his exquisitely bad decision.

But there was a hand on his neck, and the weight of it was far from the familial squeeze he felt so often from the older agent. The palm which hesitantly hovered beside the dip of his waist gave him a headache, and he opens his mouth to apologise again. Because it felt to him as if Derek were trying to silently say, _I care, kid. Just not like that._

Instead his decision was replicated. He stiffens momentarily, fidgeting under the affection before stilling as the hand carefully came down to rest, simple at his hip.

Distantly, he can hear the door of the bar swinging open from somewhere behind him. He pulls back for a second time.

“Y – you um…” he swallows, finally opening his eyes. “Uhm,” he coughs, taking a step backwards.

Unlike normal, Morgan is unreadable. His face is set, expression clear and even. No grin, but no regret either. His jaw is relaxed, but his eyes don’t show humour or delight. “You didn’t… you _don’t_ have to –”

And suddenly a dark hand is wrapped starkly against the pale length of his wrist, violent in its contrast.

“I _wanted_ to.”

\----

The flight back to Quantico was quiet. Morgan used his headphones as always; Reid tried his best to keep his eyes on his chess set and not on the couch across from him where the older agent was reclined.

The paperwork in the office takes no more than two hours, and by the time seven in the morning rolls around, Hotch is packing himself up and telling everyone to take the day off to catch up on well-needed rest.

Morgan goes home, takes Clooney for a run, and proceeds to sleep for almost twelve hours straight. Reid does the exact opposite. He showers, reads eight books, finishes a research paper on philosophical discussion and sleeps – well, naps – for four hours before returning to work.

Neither of them acknowledges the warm discomfort of the conclusion to their previous case, nor do they seem to act different around each other in the bullpen in the months which follow.

But Spencer knows. He recognises it in the way Derek laughs, the way he grins, how he no longer stiffens when the younger agent brushes past him in a flurry of words and hand gestures during an influx of information regurgitation.

And Derek picks up the differences too. In the way Spencer turns his head to look at the floor, hiding his slowly reddening cheeks after unsure eye-contact from across the room. They slight tilt of his chin when he looks up from his desk and takes the offered mug of coffee with the perfect amount of sugar Derek has somehow worked out he loves.

\----

It’s in the fall of the following year that Reid asks the question that makes him twitch.

They’re in the kitchenette at the office. He has a coffee, and for a change Reid is clutching black tea against his chest, nursing at it slowly.

_“What is this?”_ He asked quietly, after Morgan had gently guided him to the side, so he could reach for the milk, with one careful hand at his waist. _“What are we?”_ Morgan wants to brush it aside at first, but then he sees the blazing curiosity and the innocence in his expression.

He sets his paper cup aside with an exhale and clutches at the counter with two hands.

Morgan begins to prepare himself, _we’re not any different to what we’ve always been_. But then he remembers the cabin, and the shape of the kid’s slender frame sprawled alone, across the floor with foam at the corners of his mouth and eyes rolling into the back of his head.

So, instead, he says something else.

“This is procrastination,” he declares. “And we’re something we don’t understand yet.”

Spencer smiles, a broad, genuine one that makes Derek feel as though he’s done something right for a change.

“Okay,” the boy grins. He rests a hand against the curve of Derek’s shoulder blade. “Let me know when you understand, then.” The warmth of his palm lingers for several minutes, and Derek knows then that he had understood lifetimes ago, after the space Spencer gifted him following Chicago.

Again, it’s abundantly clear how much Spencer reads him, and how well he comprehends what he needs.

\----

The frequency at which the kid manages to worm himself into harm’s way continues to baffle Morgan. It’s been three and a half months since their conversation in the kitchenette, and he truly has been procrastinating ever since. He’s trying to convince himself he doesn’t need someone at his side in the way he knows Reid wants to be at his side. But isolation and singularity isn’t safety anymore, its just a never-ending stretch of loneliness when he knows he could easily have more.

So, when he watches the sliding door to their unsub’s home shut with Reid on the other side, his heart stutters the same way it had watching Reid withdraw violently in the bathroom of his apartment after finishing that last vial of Dilaudid.

“Reid?” He yells, “what are you doing?” He jams a hand against the handle, struggling with it and ignoring the way Reid is begging him to back away. The look in his eyes is feverish and deadly serious.

Half an hour later the entire house is surrounded by doctors and a decontamination team. Morgan is persistent in his defiance, staying at the scene and conferring with Reid on everything he’s finding within the house. It only takes another hour or so before they’ve managed to extract Reid, find a potential antidote and begin showering him down in the backyard behind a confine of plastic sheets.

“Go help Hotch,” Spencer suggests.

“Hotch has plenty of people helping him,” he argues. “Reid, I’m going to see you off to the hospital,” he snaps when the kid starts to argue right back. Spencer bites his bottom lip before glaring at him.

“I’m about to have to strip, so they can scrub me down,” he clips, knowing he’s won. Derek narrows his eyes.

“I’ll turn around then,” he contends. Spencer sighs, turning his face away as it heats up uncomfortably.

\----

There’s too much coughing, and it’s making Derek more worried then he should be. Spencer’s changing colours, going as pale as he was green only seconds ago.

“My throat’s a little dry,” he mumbles. “But other than that, I feel…” And then the genius is struggling against his tongue, bloodshot eyes widening and rolling around the inside of the ambulance with vigour until they settle on him.

“Driver, faster,” the doctor says sharply. Derek braces himself in his seat beside the kid, watching the blood smearing across his chin while holding eye contact, even after Spencer is long gone.

The words the doctor uses as they wheel him through the halls make Derek’s chest prickle restlessly.

_Respiratory distress._

But he’s being guided into a waiting room and left alone to worry before he can say anything else.

\----

He’s comfortable, anxious – but comfortable. Derek is reclined in a cushiony chair meant for family only. He’s pawing through an old magazine, mostly to look like he’s doing something other than sitting and waiting impatiently for the kid to wake up.

Spencer is the right colour now, hair long and splayed across the hospital pillow gracelessly. There’s a breathing tube resting over his nose, and he’s no longer coughing and rolling his neck around in his sleep like a ragdoll.

“Hey, kid.” Derek speaks as softly as he can manage when Spencer blearily opens his eyes.

“Is there any more Jell-O?” He asks hoarsely, eyeing the cup in the agent’s hands. “What happened?”

“You’re gonna be all right, kid.” Spencer visibly settles in the bed, his head coming down to rest against the pillows while his eyes stay open. “I – I think,” Derek huffs. “I think I understand now.”

Spencer smiles mildly, reaching one hand out in offering. Derek takes it in his spare hand, squeezing once.

“Me too,” Spencer mumbles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scream CM prompts and requests and ideas at me on my tumblr (same username as on here)<3

**Author's Note:**

> Scream CM prompts and requests and ideas at me on my tumblr (same username as on here) pls I'm craving it <3
> 
> \----
> 
> Give @spidersonangst @febufluff-whump (on Tumblr) all the credit, the only reason this is happening this month is because of them!


End file.
